I didn’t want to see news pictures of a soldier being murdered in Woolwich this week. I didn’t want to see film of violent brutality and, whilst being aware of the dilemma for news organisations and the moral questions about ‘facing reality’, was not sure that the coverage should have been so graphic. Try seeing it through the eyes of his family. It feels voyeuristic.

That said, however, while trying to flip over one photo in a newspaper, I noticed the road sign close to where the soldier’s body lay. It said: ‘signals timing changed’. Despite it referring to the traffic lights, it seemed perversely apposite.

Much of the reporting of this appalling crime rests on iconic images and language. This is what makes it so powerful: it creates associations in the mind of the viewer, not all of which might be healthy. Debate continues to rage over the radicalisation of young Muslim men in England – and a study of media articles between 2000-08 found only 2% framed Muslims positively. Just as newspapers’ use of ‘invasion’ to describe the arrival of around 150,000 Germans in London for last night’s Champions League Final between Germany and Bayern Munich (that’s a little joke for the Germans), so do images of and language about Muslims shape the way we see them.

Yes, the Muslim communities in England face some challenges – including addressing the poisonous rhetoric of some powerful preachers. But, they will not be helped by the perpetuation of purely negative associations.

I was at the Meissen Delegation Visit in Leicester this last few days. This brought a group of German bishops and church leaders to engage with us on how we do interfaith work in a multicultural city like Leicester. (Curiously, the English delegation, which I did not choose, served up three bishops – Bradford, Woolwich and Pontefract – who all served their time in the Diocese of Leicester.) Events in Woolwich, coupled with the long-planned visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Meissen group, brought a brutal relevance to our discussions and debates. In our discussions with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, we found no ducking the hard questions, no hiding behind a victim mentality, and only a little hiding the particular behind the general. We met openness and generosity.

This has been playing on my mind while waiting for flights today. I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the SPD (German Socialist opposition party) celebrating its 150th anniversary in Leipzig last Thursday in the surprising presence of Angela Merkel. The party is struggling ahead of the forthcoming general election in September this year and the commentators suggest that the problem lies in the lack of a clear alternative narrative for Germany’s future in the light of the current economic and fiscal challenges across Europe. So, they look to the past – and it’s reassuring glories – in the absence of a vision that might drive them into creating a different future.

The SPD is not alone in this. It sometimes feels as if Europe is paralysed. The sterile and increasingly febrile debate about Europe in the UK offers no escape. If Europe needs a new narrative – one that relies less on the dynamics derived from twentieth century wars and seeks to create a new narrative that will fire up a new generation of people who see something worth building – then so does England. Muddling through crisis after crisis, reacting to the stimulus provided by a cacophony of voices, lurching between ideological intuitions, making statements about terrorism and ‘our way of life’ – none of this can replace the need for leadership that knows who we are, what we are about and where we are going. As Jeremy Paxman once pointed out in his book The English, we don’t know who we are and, so, cannot know who we want to become.

Reactions to Lee Rigby’s murder have demonstrated again that we have no guiding narrative any longer. As Philip Blond argued on BBC Radio 4 this morning, a culture that obsesses about rights without a fundamental (I use the word advisedly) or radical (again, I use the word advisedly) anthropology that knows why it thinks people matter will simply end up as a victim to the loudest or most powerful ideological competitor. It is the lack of such an anthropology that is the problem.

To cut a long argument short, England’s Christian amnesia has left us with just this problem. The church has not helped promote the memory (partly by complaining about all the wrong things), but it will not have to go far to recover its basic driving narrative and hold it out as one worth recovering for the future. Why? Because at least we know why people matter, why morality matters, why loving your neighbour is not a mere option for the romantic, why losing your life is the only way to gain it, why the common good is worth serving, why “no man is an island, entire of itself”, and why failure is not the end.

The signals timing keeps changing. I think we need to pay attention to how it is changing and what it is saying.

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7 Responses to “Signals timing changed”

You’ve changed your blog design. Like it! Sorry—- to the blog! What we see in the Woolwich event is the age old disconnect between ideology and responsibiity, which seems to lie at the centre of whenever people who take on ‘religion’ because of some deep personal neediness become obsessed with a belief system that is unrelated to what ‘religion’ is, and begin to interpret it from their own unstable mental perspective. Doesn’t seem to matter what faith they assume: Crusades were Christian, Bosnia was Muslim, the outcome is identical. Haven’t got an answer, other than prayer. Have you?

Another terrorist crime here in which at least one of the apparent criminals is a convert to Islam, as per http://www.lordtobyharris.org.uk/reminding-us-that-the-terrorist-threat-has-not-gone-away/
Radicalisation (as it is called) is not confined to those brought up as Muslims.
I suspect the terrorist arson attacks on UK mosques and other anti muslim crimes of the past week in the UK weren’t all by people brought up in Christian Churches either.
First establish the facts.

Well said Nick. I heard a discussion on Radio 2 on Friday about the factors in the radicalisation of young Moslem men- and an ex-radical explained that one of the key features was them being fed a diet of ‘us and them’ mentality. It has saddened me that so much of the press coverage and reaction to this murder has been a hike in ‘us and them’ from the other side. It is a context where everybody loses. “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering”.

If the Church in the form of the Church of England is ever to be credible again in Britain it needs to find some steel in its backbone. If the church as a wider group of many denominations and groups it needs to speak with one voice. In these critical situations the media make a beeline for the nearest Anglican figure because that is identifiable as part of a community from which someone involved in a news story comes. In all these events the church needs to speak to the needs of people and point them to Jesus or God for their comfort. Anything less and the church might as well pack up shop.

While agreeing with Nicks, comments, worse coverage was in the Friday’s news when the entire family was wheeled out in a display of emotional exploitation by journalists.. Could there not be a closed period in such situations when the family is allowed some privacy. Viewers do not want or need to be treated to naked grief.

Nick, as an ex-pat Brit in Hungary, I find your blog very helpful. The overlapping themes of Britishness, Englishness and what it means to part of a Christian inter-faith society have been much on my mind lately, both in response to events here and in Britain. I agree that the English lack the common narrative and mythology which has emerged in Wales in recent years. At the same time, all the Westminster political parties seem to have abandoned their Christian followers in ‘the country’, whether puritan or catholic, so that we have the beginnings of a cultural civil war shaping up. Extremists have seized our Christian flag and dialogue is breaking down between social liberals and social conservatives.

In Europe, the SPD’s lack of vision mirrors a wider malaise…the failure of Social Democracy to go East. We are still waiting for the broken tradition to repair itself in Hungary. Perhaps that’s the problem…England and Europe need something more radical, more fundamentally faithful to their traditions, and far more creative and imaginative than a series of botched and patched-up coalitions and alliances. Something led by ecumenical, ‘evangelical’ Christians in politics, but not exclusive, able to give fresh engagement to inter-faith dialogue and relate to humanists who reject the liberal atheism which has come to dominate a lot of English thinking and politics in recent years.

It may have been hurried but it was spot on6. Why do we seem to identify as a nation so clearly with legal violence ie war to find an identity? Blair on we are going to reshape the middle east. What arrogance Haigh putting arms into Syria and Cameron celebrating[!] World War I beginning. We Christians have a much clearer identity message to give to both men and women. The trouble is what should be a great fanfare is a very uncertain sound.